


soleil levant

by tin_girl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Regulus Black-centric, You're Welcome, a lonely story, background Sirius Black/Remus Lupin - Freeform, for everyone who also had a lonely christmas, written because i had a lonely christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 19:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22003396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Regulus’s favourite mug had see-through spots, and when you got to the bottom of it, the last gulp of tea, light would stream through the specks. It’s like that painting, Sirius told him once, and Regulus read about the author later in some corner bookstore, a Muggle. The sunrise painting, you know?, only Sirius couldn’t remember the name. Weeks later, it would be one of the many dishes his mother could afford to break in anger, the glass cabinets intact but everything they ate from in pieces at her feet, the imprint of her palm on Sirius’s cheek and Regulus’s own stinging all the worse from the lack of a matching one.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 16
Kudos: 72





	soleil levant

I kneel into a dream where I

am good & loved. I am

good. I am loved. My hands have made

some good mistakes. They can always

make better ones

~Natalie Wee, _Least of All_

Autumn come early, when Sirius first went to Hogwarts, the train getting smaller until it was but a dot, and summer packing up her bags, everything already gold. 

All that gold, and weeks later Regulus would get a barely legible letter, a smear of butter on the envelope. 

Reggie, it said, promise you won’t start hating me?

A month prior, the sound of Sirius’s suitcase shutting. 

Reggie, it said, have you ever noticed how sunrises are red? 

And so, the very next morning, Regulus woke up early enough to see it spread like egg yolk runny on the pan, and, a hand over his heart, he whispered that promise into the cold air.

He wouldn’t ever break it, no matter what Sirius thought. 

*

It’s after one of their first fights, Snape’s nose close to an aubergine both in colour and shape, and scratch marks on Regulus’s face, his skin as if sizzling everywhere a stinging hex hit. They’re hardly close friends, Snape and him, and Regulus jumped to his defense only from greed -- hungry for Sirius’s attention, even if all he’d ever get was insults and violence. 

“Thank you,” Snape says, something Regulus hasn’t heard in weeks, and Regulus almost feels bad for him, remembers how Lily Evans near slapped her mouth to cover the beginnings of a laugh when James Potter made Snape’s pants float up into the air and sang a rhyme about it. 

Regulus puts his knuckles to his mouth to feel it better -- how Sirius’s hex still makes the skin there pulse, how it knocks against his lips, an almost-heartbeat. 

*

When Regulus was eight -- nine, maybe? -- Sirius jumped onto his bed and crawled on top of him, head pillowed on Regulus’s chest, all bony, all ribs, and put his ear to his heart. 

“So fast, Reggie,” he whispered into the cotton of Regulus’s shirt. “Why does it always beat so fast? It’s like those flies that get caught under the lampshade, you know, the small ones?” 

Outside, it was snowing, and Regulus didn’t know why everything was the wait for things to go horribly wrong, why he always felt like something that was being hunted, why the world forever seemed about to end. Panic always in his throat, and Sirius’s warm weight should have made it easier to breathe, but it didn’t, and so Regulus kept silently choking on fear, every thought a breadcrumb in his throat, and kept praying that they would stay that way -- two boys and no one yelling up the stairs, two boys and no Hogwarts to come, two boys and don’t leave me alone but Sirius would, he would, he would. 

*

Shabby clothes, ugly scars all over and a smile far too boring and pleasant for someone who has so many of them. 

“Better go to Pomfrey with this,” Remus Lupin tells him, pointing at the bite on Regulus’s hand as if Regulus would get confused otherwise. Smile far too boring and pleasant, and yet every time Regulus sees them together, Sirius smiles back as if Lupin is better than a sky full of stars. 

Regulus watches the blood well up and says nothing. 

“An owl did it, right? It might get infected--”

“What do you care?” Regulus snaps, and he hates how he sounds -- like a spoiled child, like someone who always had his eggs peeled for him, and he did, he did, and that first breakfast in Hogwarts, his fingers too clumsy to do it properly, his big mouth complaining about how the castle elves could do it for him, surely? _Kreacher_ would--

Sirius watching him across the room, half-worry, half-pity, and as if in the middle of realizing something. 

You’re just as spoiled as me, he thinks now, remembering Sirius a few days before, voice echoing, Moony, butter my toast for me, will you, I always tear the bread. 

You’re just as spoiled as me, he thinks bitterly, only less lonely, is all. 

“I think Sirius would care,” Lupin says, thoughtful. “He might not, but I’d rather assume he would, just to be safe.” 

Later, Regulus licks the blood off and doesn’t tell anyone, wrapping his hand in a dirty towel. So what if he gets an infection? 

So what? 

*

He loved all his family, but Sirius was special. Regulus would kiss his parents’ cold cheeks, and he would smile for family photos, but it was like being a part of a china set, one that’s too precious to serve tea in, one that gets polished once a week and stays in glass cabinets, a mere decoration. 

Sirius was like cocoa, and like that one ugly mug you always drink from. 

“They said you’re a better son than me,” Sirius told him once, half-angry, half-sad, not pretending not to care, not then, not yet. 

Regulus wanted to grab his hand and ask for a bedtime story, but he was too old for stories, and something was already opening between them, something bad, a cavity, a space. 

A gap. 

Regulus’s favourite mug had see-through spots, and when you got to the bottom of it, the last gulp of tea, light would stream through the specks. _It’s like that painting_ , Sirius told him once, and Regulus read about the author later in some corner bookstore, a Muggle. _The sunrise painting, you know?_ , only Sirius couldn’t remember the name. Weeks later, it would be one of the many dishes his mother could afford to break in anger, the glass cabinets intact but everything they ate from in pieces at her feet, the imprint of her palm on Sirius’s cheek and Regulus’s own stinging all the worse from the lack of a matching one. 

*

When they come back home for the summer, Sirius barges into Regulus’s room once, yelling something about missing socks, and he stares at the newspaper clippings about the Dark Lord and his followers hanging on Regulus’s walls for full two minutes, hand still on the door handle. 

“Sweet Merlin,” he whispers, shaking his head, and that’s how Regulus learns that hate doesn’t have a smell or a taste. 

*

Once, in the middle of the night, Regulus’s first year at Hogwarts, October bleeding red like something with its throat slashed, Sirius found him in the bathroom, counting breaths and holding them in between the sounds of the tap dripping. 

Back then, Sirius was already learning how to not love him and Regulus felt it like a cold -- the weariness of it and the ache in his bones.

“I can’t sleep,” he whined, and wondered if they were ever going to share a bed again, if, back home, Sirius would ever sneak into his bedroom after midnight to talk about everything and nothing. It occurred to him that it might have been a Boggart -- this Sirius who watched him quietly instead of smiling, too scary to make one scream. 

But Sirius smiled at last, and took Regulus down to the kitchens. 

“It’s something Remus taught me,” he said, and the smile grew wider. “When you warm milk up on the stove and not with your wand, it tastes so much better, I promise. And it gets that skin on top--”

Later, half the milk boiled over, but in the end, Sirius had been right, it _was_ better.

*

When Sirius leaves, the sound of his suitcase shutting echoes and echoes and echoes. There’s a sort of relief to it, Regulus thinks later, how he’ll never have to hear that sound again, how this time it’s forever. 

How the silence that comes after is the proof that Regulus’s heart can break all it wants, no one there to see it and shake their heads. 

* 

His first Quidditch game, he fell off his broom and as he lay there on the ground, stiff and spread like something that had already died, he kept his eyes closed, gold fireworks trapped under his eyelids, and the spots of light reminded him of something but he couldn’t figure out what. 

As Sirius didn’t rush to him down the stands, as strange hands patted down his body, as people he didn’t care about yelled things somewhere near, Regulus thought that he wouldn’t even mind if he were never to see anything ever again.

*

When he first sees the Dark Lord outside a photograph, he pretends he chooses him because it’s too uncomfortable a thought, that there might have never been any choice. 

*

“You’re a pure-blood!” their mother yelled once, Sirius’s lip split where she hit him, and Regulus bit his sleeve to keep himself from laughing. Sirius’s blood might have been pure, but what of it when he would spit his family name out when introducing himself instead of speaking it, and wipe his mouth after?

It’s alright, Regulus whispered into his mother’s hair later, all the anger gone and only tears left, scrunched-up tissues all around her. It’s alright, he promised, remembering James Potter’s arm around Sirius’s shoulders. 

_He’s a pure-blood, too._

It’s alright, he lied, remembering Sirius ruffling Lupin’s hair. 

_Half-blood, at least._

Years later, in his fifth year, when he saw Sirius kiss him behind a tree, Regulus kept it to himself in spite of that. See?, he’d think, watching his brother steal egg off Lupin’s plate across the room. I could have ruined it for you, but I didn’t. I _didn’t_. 

And he smiled at the smashed pieces of what he didn’t and wouldn’t do, even though it felt strange, even though his muscles had forgotten that his lips could lift so. 

An early Christmas gift, that, and so what that later Sirius wouldn’t be there for the holidays, so what that the snow would be the loneliest Regulus had ever seen it?

So what? 

*

It occurs to Regulus that James Potter and Remus Lupin -- Pettigrew, even? -- would die for Sirius, and he cries into his pillow for the first time in years. 

It’s a good thing, too, that Sirius has people ready to die for him, since Regulus is too much of a coward to do so himself. 

*

The first time he called Sirius a blood traitor, he yelled it across a crowded corridor, and expected a war of insults, but all he got was Sirius’s back as he walked away, indifferent, his back and a lazy wave of his hand. 

“That’s how you die,” Snape hissed, an ugly smile on his face as if he was enjoying it, as if he had an ‘I told you so’ folded under his tongue for later. “Oh so slowly.” 

*

The Dark Lord likes to gloat, and Regulus is good at listening. 

When he first learns about the horcruxes, his heartbeat is steady. 

*

After that fall, his broomstick broken in two, Lupin visited Regulus in the hospital wing once. 

“He hasn’t slept since you landed here, you know,” he said, all thoughtful, all profound, all gentle understanding, and Regulus hated him, hated him, _hated_ him, and only ate the chocolate Lupin gave him months later, after it expired, after he stopped hoping that Sirius would ever talk to him again. 

*

In his last moments, he thinks of that painting. What was its name again…?

When he drowns, the water is cold, but the sacrifice of it tastes like hot milk.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading and any feedback would be much appreciated <3
> 
> also, my tumblr is 'yoyointhegarden' if anyone wants to say hi :))
> 
> Aaand if anyone's interested, I've started posting an original story here, so here's a link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917


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